Back in 2010, Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, and a few others settled with the US Department of Justice regarding their anti-poaching agreements concerning employees. While the CEOs did a good job of escaping possible prosecution, the affected employees filed a class action lawsuit about this, and judge Lucy Koh has just unsealed a number of emails concerning this case. They paint a pretty grim picture of Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt engaging in mafia practices, threatening smaller companies with patent litigation if they didn't agree to the no-poaching agreements, or demanding to handle matters verbally as to not leave a paper trail.

"They paint a pretty grim picture of Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt engaging in mafia practices, threatening smaller companies with patent litigation if they didn't agree to the no-poaching agreements, or demanding to handle matters verbally as to not leave a paper trail."

Don't mix up everything in the same sentence, you know full well this is on a completely different "evil" scale.

What about "Steve and Thom are criminals, accused of murder and rape, and suspected on lying to an Attorney" ? This is just horrible to mix up so different level of criminal activities, one is beyond any scale, and the other is almost minor. Yet, the sentence is built to make them look they are both the same.

Eric and Steve both went over the line regarding restricting the freedom of their employees. Steve made threats, that he didn't execute when Palm refused. It's a step worse, but nothing of the "scale". It's not like they murdered people.

The sad thing is that Palm went down, while Apple and Google continued to grow.

Nice people don't get rewarded often, certainly not in business.

I think to be at the top of it all you need to be mean sometimes (or often perhaps), even go beyond moral and even law. It's not fair when we hear or read about it, but sadly that's how life is.

Big corporations can get away it more easy than smaller ones. They settle or just pay up. And really, doesn't the government and justice department prefer that than a big economic force go bust? They give work to people, create jobs at other companies, make money go round, pay taxes. You want them to play fair, but don't kill them if they don't. So they can get away with breaking a law once in a while.